While You Were Sleeping

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While You Were Sleeping

Here are some things we know about the too short life of Jeffrey Williams. That he liked to play both the violin and video games. That he liked to go fishing with his dad. That he was a dedicated member of the Northside Baptist Church in Rock Hill, South Carolina. That he liked to cuddle with his sister – a galaxy of photos at his memorial service testified to that.

That he died at age 11 this June in a Best Western hotel when carbon monoxide seeped into the room from a leaky pool heater. That his mother, who was with him, was also poisoned during a trip to visit his sister at a Boone, N.C. science camp. That she attended his memorial service in a wheel chair.

And that an elderly couple from Washington state were killed by carbon monoxide in the same room in the same hotel in Boone just two months earlier. That the local authorities didn't thoroughly report or investigate the first deaths; that the local medical examiner resigned after Jeffrey died because he learned that the couple died from carbon monoxide a full week before Jeffrey's death - and failed to tell the police. That the hotel - allegedly, had installed a used pool heater and had - allegedly, as they say - ignored the manufacturer's warning that carbon monoxide detectors should be installed in case of a gas leak.

That there was not a carbon monoxide detector in the hotel to wail an alarm, no protective flash of light and sound as the gas slipped out into the night. No warning at all as one of our most famously efficient poisons wound its way into the room where a little boy and his mother lay sleeping.

So that what we know about Jeffrey William's too short life should drive us to not just but why not. Ask why did this happen? But also ask - why not prevent it to begin with?

Why not be meticulous regarding a gas-burning heater when we all know - or pretend to know - that any machine/device/engine capable of emitting carbon monoxide is one that's capable of killing any one of us. And because we all know - or pretend to know - that, , why not install carbon monoxide detectors? They range in cost between $15-$40 when I look them up on Amazon although hotels can probably get them for less.

Just why not?

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The fact is that we tend, in general, to be too often too careless about carbon monoxide. Perhaps it's the comfort of familiarity. This is an old, well-known poisonous gas, after all, first created in a laboratory in 1776, first identified as a compound of carbon and oxygen in the year 1800. It is largely produced by the incomplete combustion of carbon-rich fuels, from wood to gasoline. It finds it opportunity in everything from forest fires to boat engines.

Although it directly poison tissues, carbon monoxide mostly kills by a kind of chemical suffocation. The proteins in our blood that transport oxygen have - by pure biological bad luck - a far greater affinity for carbon monoxide. Toxicologists say that the bond between carbon monoxide and the iron-rich protein hemoglobin is some 200 times stronger than that with oxygen. So carbon monoxide simply and relentlessly muscles oxygen out of the blood stream and replaces it.

The gas itself - colorless, odorless, tasteless - provides no warning of its presence (unless detectors are installed). And the early symptoms - headache, dizziness, and nausea - are often mistaken until late for something else. But the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) also notes that because the gas is so silent, so subtle in its attack "people who are sleeping or intoxicated can die from CO poisoning before ever experiencing symptoms."

As did the man camping in Cumberland, Maryland this weekend, when the generator attached to his RV sent carbon monoxide into the vehicle while he lay dreaming. The Wisconsin man who died in his sleep last month after a basement generator started leaking gas. The young Indiana couple who also died of carbon monoxide poisoning in the night after leaving a car running in their garage. Or the couple from British Columbia who never woke up after their trailer flooded with carbon monoxide one night. Or the two little Florida girls I wrote about a couple years ago, both killed when a parent left a car running overnight in the attached garage. The CDC estimate, from a 2011 analysis, is that accidental exposure to carbon monoxide kills as many as 500 people in the United States every year and sends another 15,000 or more to the hospital.

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Do we believe - or maybe just like to believe - that when we check into a hotel, such risks go away? That when we pay for a clean room, a nicely made made, a bathroom stocked with tiny bottles of shampoo and lotion, that we're also paying for a safe harbor?

I often see it that way - a little cocoon of a place to spend the night, a nest tucked away from all the hassles of every day life. But, of course, the death of Jeffrey Williams in the Best Western Plus Blue Ridge Plaza - and the deaths of Daryl and Shirley Jenkins of Longview, Washington in the same place two months earlier - tells us otherwise. And if we look it's not that hard to find other examples: the man who died of carbon monoxide poisoning last year in a West Virginia Holiday Inn; the Doubletree hotel in Key West, Florida which, after a guest was killed by carbon monoxide, was found to be operating without the proper permits; the five teenagers who died in a South Florida hotel after a car was left running in the building garage; the nine guests hospitalized after carbon monoxide leaked from a rooftop heater into a Hampton Inn in Seneca, New York; the 12 guests hospitalized following a carbon monoxide leak in a Norman, Oklahoma hotel, and the other examples too numerous to list here. A study (paywall) of such incidents between 1989 and 2004 counted 69 incidents, 772 people poisoned and 22 dead. And a more recent investigation by USA Today, published in January, counted eight deaths and 170 hotel-related hospitalizations in the past two years.

And, the investigation pointed out, almost none of those hotels had installed carbon monoxide detectors. A consultant for the hotel industry told the newspaper that it would just be too expensive. And, as that story also points out, while many states require contractors to install carbon monoxide detectors when they build home, that's rarely demanded when it comes to hotel construction. You can find a list of state statutes here.

Among the states that do demand such protective measures are South Carolina (just this summer), New Jersey, Michigan, and my home state of Wisconsin. Do they save lives? Consider this incident at a Wisconsin hotel in June, just a week after Jeffrey Williams died. A jacuzzi heater malfunctioned, carbon monoxide started seeping into the hotel, the building was evacuated. And why was it evacuated? Hotel employees, themselves starting to suffer headaches, were alerted by a carbon monoxide detector. Nine people went to the hospital but no one died.

Two days after Jeffrey Williams's death, legislation was introduced to require carbon monoxide detectors in some hotel rooms (containing or adjacent to fuel-burning appliances for all hotels in North Carolina). Miller's family argues that better regulation would require the detectors in all guest rooms - which, of course, is true. And there are plans to broaden the International Building Code for hotels, requiring CO detectors in all rooms in several years.

I could wish, of course, that that deadline was sooner. Today, tomorrow, yesterday, last year, in time to allow this little boy to wake up on a summer morning and hang out with his sister in the afternoon. But since I can't have that I'll wish that you remember that this can also happen in your home and that if you don't have carbon monoxide detectors, you are now running out to get them.

And I'll wish for industry to just do the right thing, wake up, spend the dollars to install detectors, be proactive about protecting those of us tucked away in hotel cocoon.

That's what I wish. But all signs - and the defensive reaction from those in the "hospitality" business, lead me to suspect otherwise. That instead we'll be counting down the days until we have to say goodbye to another Jeffrey Williams.